Dreamer’s world May 28 2015

There are morning that remind me of my childhood. these are mornings when things seem so wonderful, the weather is awesome and I find myself remembering days just like this when I was a small child. I can see myself in my hometown, I can hear the birds singing, I can see my friends as we all used to be.
Memories are a wonderful thing at times like this. They remind us where we have been, and serve as a reminder of where we are going. The motion is always forward, and it is best to not stop for too long to reminisce, but it is very nice when we do. I choose to cherish memories like the ones form this morning. They will give me an inner peace that I might otherwise have lacked.
My hometown is a long way away now. Life has taken me on a wonderful journey, and I have seen so many things that I would never have dreamed of as a child. I do not have any real ties that bind me to my hometown anymore. When my Mom died in 2001, that basically cut the cord for me. I have not been back since then. Memories like the ones I describe are how I choose to remember growing up. A time before the pressures of being an adult creeped into my life.
I don’t have anything against my hometown, it was a wonderful place to grow up. Leaving there was simply something that I felt had to be done. So many of the people I grew up with are still there, and they are happy. I just realized when I was a teenager that I had another calling. My parents encouraged me to not set limits and to not restrict myself to what my hometown had to offer. I cannot thank them enough for their wisdom and guidance.
As for family ties, that is a long and complicated story. Suffice to say that due to my Mom being an orphan, there was a really strange “family” arrangement as I grew up. My Mom found her blood siblings later in life and that would normally seem a wonderful thing. In her case, I saw more upset than joy as she tried to rebuild relationships that never really existed. This caused endless friction between my Dad, myself and Mom’s relatives, with a few notable exceptions. Dad saw the issues that Mom had as she tried to navigate between who she was and who she might have been. Mom was not unstable at all, she just regretted not having known her siblings growing up. That bothered her at times, and she never fully realized that some of her siblings were not the wonderful people she thought that they were.
Wow, that was a deep dive tangent! I suppose it had to be said for some reason. Serendipity always has a reason. The point is that I never developed a deep bond with any of Mom’s siblings, in fact, I steered clear of them as much as possible. There is no reason to go any deeper.
I wonder why the memories always seem to trigger other things? I don’t have the answer to that one. Thinking about things like this does not take away from the wonderful memories that I mentioned in the beginning, I suppose in a way that it is just a way of expounding upon them. To shut them off is to deny oneself what could be a valuable insight, so I always follow through.
Back to the story, I left my hometown in 1983 and basically never looked back. I visited there while Mom was still alive, but found that once she passed away, there was basically no incentive to take me back there again. I suppose that my extended absence has triggered the memories this morning. I will enjoy the rest of my day, as well as the memories.